Bang on three-thirty, the UKIP smokers spilled out from Westminster Hall to light up after what was a gruelling group hug inside. MEP Geoffrey Bloom had earlier referred to their women members as “sluts” and whacked the political reporter Michael Crick across his comb over.

Our band of weekend ramblers left south London early for the beautiful north Kent marshes and during the hour’s car journey east, we imagined a dash to a future airport terminal where a sprawl of concrete ramps and runways would take over the landscape – all yet to be built but ‘on the drawing board,’ as they say.

The resulting sequence tells us of Ella’s first independent steps, escaping from the clutches of her mum, 11 months after leaving the womb .. giving the idea of leaving safety with more of an evolutionary sense of Homo erectus mastering balance and momentum. The picture needed to show the hominid’s moment of upright motion.

Not far from where Barbara Hepworth’s bronze Divided Circle once impressed us before its brutal execution, a Peace Pillar between two Cabbage Palms with the words ‘May Peace Prevail on Earth’ – looks overwhelmed, a Hiroshima-inspired memorial being buried in the depths of a nuclear winter.

Everyday street spectacles: Tragic fires or the rioting mob, there are countless, similarly documented events in this century that bring nearer the sum total of an organic metropolis. Throughout the ages London has itself repeated – scenarios forever rewound. In the aftermath of the Blitz, bomb sites reverted to nature with species not seen since genteel Tudor times.